more like thucydideez nuts, gottem
Image is of a satellite image from MizarVision, a Chinese firm that has recently shown pride in being sanctioned for showing uncensored images of the Middle East. The West is not allowing up-to-date satellite imagery of the region to hide destruction.
As always, my weekly summary/preamble is in spoilers below.
preamble
Military news remained relatively subdued last week, with the main front continuing to be the Lebanon border. With dozens of vehicles destroyed and many more Zionist casualties, they are now desperately searching for a solution to the FPV drone threat, with certain analysts characterizing the whole situation as the entity stumbling foot-first into a bear trap (hence the megathread title). Unfortunately for them, two better and more resourceful militaries have spent the last year or two also searching for a solution and have generally failed - with anti-drone strategies consisting mainly of 1) build your own cheap drones designed to physically intercept their cheap drones and 2) separate your forces up rather than conducting large frontal assaults WW2-style and accept that you’re gonna have to fight for many months to gain substantial ground. This also explains why they’re so eager to kickstart a civil war in Lebanon, although as I’ve stated before, I don’t personally know whether that would be a silver bullet given how the Lebanese army has been deliberately not allowed to become a threatening force due to Zionist fears, and indeed, I don’t know how many Lebanese citizens and soldiers would fight against the only force in their country fighting against an army trying to annex their territory and which murders hundreds of people at a time in aerial bombings on their cities.
Aside from the ever-worsening global economic catastrophe, the main event has been the US visiting China. Trump clearly intended to time the summit such that it took place after subjugating Iran and perhaps also Cuba. However, with the former goal not even remotely achieved, and the latter goal delayed - hopefully indefinitely, though the US still seems pretty intent on it - it all amounted to a big nothingburger. Marxist economist Michael Roberts has written up a great piece on the current state of the US-China economic conflict, stating among things that, despite the last decade of US sanctions and economic warfare, the Chinese economy has done extremely well, building up their own domestic industries to replace commodities lost from sanctions. China has, up to this point, refused to withdraw its aid from Iran, and seems to be looking to start moving its tankers through the Strait via Iran’s new tolling mechanism.
China obviously continues to maintain its position on Taiwan, and Trump has continued the US tradition of respecting this in words and disrespecting it in actions, but it’s becoming clear to everybody but the most delusional diehards that the US will not be fighting China in and around the Pacific for at least a couple decades, and likely never will. There is little choice. The Ramadan War has definitively proven that the US has been severely militarily and logistically weakened over the decades despite skyrocketing military budgets, and much of their equipment, strategies, and tactics are woefully outdated for the modern battlefield. The prospect of the US fighting a war against China and not immediately losing has gone from “almost implausible” to “hilariously absurd”. Unable to meaningfully impede China, the US will have to content itself to increasingly ineffective sanctions campaigns and bullying/overthrowing nations that do not currently have much of a capacity to resist. In that vein, one hopes that Iran and friends will share their expertise in drone technology and underground fortification around the world. The age of the tunnel is upon us.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
US SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve) fell by ~10 million barrels last week, setting a new record. Keep in mind that over 10 million barrels PER DAY are being blocked at Hormuz.
As expected, sour crude (that is the primary crude type from the Middle East) is down more, ~6mb, while sweet is down ~4mb. The fast rate of drawdown is starting to worry some experts, those salt caves weren’t designed for that. It could compromise their structural integrity.
Sour crude reserves: 232mb, sweet crude reserves: 142mb.
So it is going to be 1 more year of this.
They are drawing down the SPR at record pace and still are only able to replace less than one day of the Hormuz deficit per week. The rest of the world is doing the same. So oil inventories everywhere are still dropping. SPR can’t be (legally and practically) drawn down to zero just at the whim of the Trump admin, so this can’t go on for more than ~2 months. There is a certain minimum of reserves in the system, where stuff begins to break down. Refineries can’t run out of crude even for 5 minutes or they can break down. Pressures in pipelines/storage can drop, resulting in low flow even tho oil is still there. Also logistics can become a problem.
I hope you are right man, It’s going to take more than 2 months to send the new crude from Iran all the way to Europe and america, so if it’s 2 months, we are already in the fun zone it’s just that there is a lag.
I guess I have to agree with your “hope” here. Our planet entering the Cool Zone is not something that I look forward to, but Iran is under attack by the terrorist USIS forces and entering (or at least demonstrating the ability to create it) the Cool Zone is part of their self-defense strategy. Now it is up to the fascist forces in the USIS and Europe to show if they are capable of stepping away from it, even if this means that they aren’t able to kill millions of Iranians for fun & steal their oil. I am just not sure they can walk away from that tho. Once the Cool Zone is close, the fascists might react in exactly the opposite way to how most people expect and restart the war anyway and make everything even worse on purpose.
You can look at it another way, what we have, is due to plundering the middle east. A collapse of oil infrastructure or even industrial civilization, it’s the way it should have been. If Iran can’t profit from oil, the rest of us shouldn’t either. These last hundred years of history were built on the blood and freedom of middle easterners, and they deserve restitution, failing that, a “demand readjustment” is the next best thing, the more the better, even if I myself get adjusted.
The pressure in the reserves can drop significantly if the levels drop too low, and the oil itself can spoil the longer it’s exposed. Different refineries can only process certain types of Crude, yada yada yada.
The true figure is hard to place when using averages to measure this shit when the reserves are actually dozens of facilities that have their own failure points and shutoff levels. We’ll see things judder to a halt well before the charts drop to zero.
yeah, i dont think the reserves would ever be completely tapped outside of a genuinely existentialist threat to the state, so never happening outside of a civil war magically springing up out of no where
from my understanding they will never actually fully withdraw these reserves because withdrawing them too low will permanently damage the reserves or something like this. even if they do (whether because im misinformed or they’re that stupid, doesnt matter which really) it would be more like 3/4 of a year